MonuMental

I’ll admit; I’ve gotten into “Kitchen Nightmares”.
The Chef Ramsay show where he enters these failing, dysfunctional restaurants and tried to fix them over the course of a week. Gordon Ramsay is a famous top-rated chef who has met incredible success from years of education, training, and most importantly, work. He starts by simply checking out the produce, looking at the menu, investigating the equipment and checking cleanliness of the restaurant. He then sits down and experiences what their lunch service is like, and then later observes how they perform during the dinner hours. He’s able to find nearly everything wrong with the places during these three phases of survey. These are the remarkable activities where the viewer can watch Chef Ramsay spew onto the local staff his knowledge and expertise that spans decades and continents.

What’s often intriguing about the show is how often the previous mentioned aesthetics are only half of the problem. A tougher issue to deal with are the family restaurants who are distraught for interpersonal reasons. People who are tied together with a close personal history yet are being broken apart piece by piece from slowly going under day by day. Most of the time it’s the business that begins to do poorly that later causes the people involved to grow apart, but in this case it seemed to be the young married couple who brought their problems to the restaurant.

Some young newlyweds thought they would start a fun little restaurant and put their heart and souls into it. They got it off the ground and got ready for the roles of entrepreneurship; where they won’t know if they’ve made the cut to survive until much further down the road. Things moved along and the business grew, and they settled into cushy jobs as owners of a budding establishment. They grew comfortably in their new marriage and the life they had created together, and soon enough began trying to have a baby. Though the restaurant was very much their first child and it required their constant investment of time and money, they wanted to place that same dedication towards having a real family.

Time went by – and it didn’t happen.

The restaurant continued to operate decently as usual, though went a bit on auto-pilot while it was slowly yet steadily neglected by its parents.

The couple, no longer fresh from the chapel, had their up’s and down’s but were still giving it their best to both endeavors. As the stakes rose they decided the business was bringing in enough money to look into IVF* as a means to become pregnant.

(*IVF is a way to get pregnant. You’ll find no information here.)

The IVF process can be incredibly taxing on a couple, and it was astonishing to hear how it tore the lives of all parties involved.

The wife took shots regularly. Big needles with bio-chemical solutions that might burn as the plunger is pressed deeper into the canister.

The solvents are manufactured to have quick as well as gradual effects on the female body.

You become hot.

Irritable.

Angry.

Depressed.

Tired.

Horny.

Exhausted.

People will tell you, it’s hard.

Some may stride right through it. Others you become completely unsatisfiable, all in hopes to later create a family for yourself and the person you want to be with most.

What role did the husband play in this?

How would you want your best man to support you during this?

This guy was out. Hanging out. Partying. Whatever you might call it, or however you want to paint it. Everything I know about this process is that whether it ends in pregnancy or not, an non-negotiable result is two individuals who have been tested, nightly, weekly, monthly, about their dedication to their marriage, their love, and their desire to share it with a child.

It takes a very strong couple sometimes to surpass the very experience and its life-changing remnants.

The wife was making immense efforts, relying on her commitment to her husband and the family she wanted most.

The husband handled the stress with abandonment.

It’s like trying to build a home with crumbling bricks.

The stress of the IVF experience was of course magnified by how the husband dealt with the situation.

They argued.

They couldn’t be in the same room together – and the process of fertilization was ultimately more painful than it needed to be.

Here you would have found the restaurant in a state of abuse also.

They argued in it. They separated into two individual units that put each other down in it. What used to be two people with a vision was then two separate owners with individual agendas. He was too nice and didn’t handle his responsibility, so he stayed in the kitchen. She was detail oriented and driven. She stayed in the front.

At the point when they could no longer be in the restaurant at the same time, he moved out and got his own apartment.

Everything was failing. Gordon saw this and hoped he could fix it.

Well into the week he put them together in the kitchen and said “Your mission is for the two! of you, to make me one!, delicious entrée. Talk it out, figure it out, and make it together.” When he left they didn’t talk.

She made her shrimp.

He saw what she was doing and made his chicken. Chef Ramsay came back on two attempts to check on their progress and after some reiteration and bickering gave up on his strategy and let them be.

They gave him two plates instead of one. The shrimp was good. The chicken was ok.

He later met with them outside the restaurant. He had improved every other aspect of the business. They stood out the cold outdoors and he told them that he gets it. Not foreseeing any chance of them ever being together again, he then told them flatly “You do have a child though; that restaurant! And if you can realign your sites, and make this thing happen, make it work, after I’ve given you every tool possible, you… will be two successfully happy people, whether apart, or together. If you can’t understand that then there’s no hope for either of you, or the restaurant.”

And he left.

The finality in his voice was cold in the air. They half-glanced at one another and saw themselves, finally, as apart. And you know what; I’ve seen people do this. It’s like their live becomes one big publicity stunt to show the other that they’re not needed, that they’ve hurt them so bad they have made them mean nothing to the other person. And the deeper their love, the further away they retreat. They recognized the harm they had done one another and that they were still indeed strung together by the years of fibers they wove between themselves and their lives. They had hurt themselves as much as they had hurt the other. Their abuse to their baby showed clearly.

They also saw how their employees, after all this time working for two bosses who treated each other like Gods of war more than respectful co-owners, still loved it too.

The next day Chef Ramsay came in and they told him about that night’s special entrée. And how they came up with the idea together. They even traded places in the restaurant that night at dinnertime and with a SNAP, everything made sense. He was not only comfortable greeting and working with the guests, he excelled at it. He was easy-going and made sure everybody in the dining room was happy. She rocked and rolled in the kitchen. She delegated work and made sure everything moved with good speed and quality-checked every item before it left for the tables. After all this time, they were for the first time where they should have been from the beginning.

The show left them in a positive state of mind, and though at that point they still did not plan to become a couple again they were finally doing something good for themselves, for each other, and for everyone involved.

It makes you realize how much time we can waste once we get addicted to cultivating our weaknesses.

The human condition makes us unique in the way that our mentalities allow our unresolved emotions of the past to not only waste the present, but cause us to unobservantly negate our futures as well.

How often are we missing our greatest strengths in light of a difficulty that we really should approach?

How many of us have good enough a friend to do what Chef Ramsay did and call them out on their bullshit, and say “Quit the struggle. You’ve made your point. Now you’re just dragging the other down with yourself.” the Shit or Get Off The Pot mentality.

How many of us are fortunate enough to have survived the hardships of IVF with a healthy understanding of the feelings of the other? And whether or not you were fortunate enough to conceive, in the end you have two paths. By the time it’s over there has been two submental decisions that occurred. You either go on by yourself and carry the weight of the entire misfortune, or you share the experience with your dedicated partner and metabolize the challenges of this world together, and let the challenge you overcame tie you closer to one another.

I’ve only been watching Kitchen Nightmares for a few weeks, maybe even a month now, but none of the 15-plus prior episodes gave me such an introspection to the lives of others whom I am not.

What would be the world in the case that we always strive for understanding, and empathy for those around us?